UNMC professor appointed to federal committee

University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Chairman of Pathology, Dr. Steven Hinrichs has been appointed to a federal committee, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee.

CLIAC is a federal advisory committee administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It provides scientific and technical advice and guidance to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies on issues related to clinical laboratories that are regulated under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1988.

Dr. Hinrichs says, “It is an amazing process. In this case I was originally appointed under the Obama Administration and then re-evaluated under the Trump Administration prior to allowing this nomination to go through. It was quite a process.”

This is likely the first time anyone from Nebraska has been on this committee. Dr. Hinrichs has been on other committees for the CDC and UNMC has other faculty members on federal committees but this is the first appointment to CLIAC.

Cr. Hinrichs says, “CLIAC is the federal body that regulates all clinical laboratories in the United States. That is laboratories that are in hospitals or in clinics. They are all controlled under the CLIAC committee.” He says those issues range from the number of people working in the lab, the amount of training the laboratory has to whether they should be handling a certain organism. Anything associated with a clinical laboratory is regulated by this organization.